Greenland

Day 1: Our first icebergs

Despite its misleading name, Greenland is not green — especially not in March. Everything is white: the ground, the rooftops, the sky, and the enormous icebergs parked in the fjord like frozen skyscrapers. On our first day, we hiked around the town of Ilulissat and out to the nearby Ilulissat Icefjord, and the views stopped us in our tracks. Icebergs of every shape and size stretched to the horizon, glowing blue and white against the Arctic sky. It’s one of those landscapes that photographs can’t quite do justice to — the sheer scale of it doesn’t fit in a frame.

Our bed & breakfast host Jannik told us we were lucky to have such nice weather. The daytime high today was -18°C (0°F), and at night it dropped to -25°C (-13°F). If this is lucky, we’d hate to see unlucky. Had we arrived just a few weeks earlier, it would have been -35°C (-31°F), which Jannik described as dangerous to be outside in for too long. At those temperatures, life in Ilulissat requires some creative engineering: engine heaters need to stay plugged in below -15°C so cars will start, gasoline gets additives to prevent condensation at -35°C, and every house has electrically heated insulation around its water pipes to keep them from freezing solid. Living here isn’t just cold — it’s a full-time negotiation with the elements.

But honestly, the cold is part of the experience. Everything feels sharper, clearer, more vivid when the air itself is trying to freeze your eyelashes together.

• Accommodation: Paa & Jannik B&B

Day 2: Wait, is that the same iceberg?

We can’t get enough of the icebergs, so today we explored more hiking trails along the coast. The Ilulissat Icefjord is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the few places where Greenland’s vast interior ice sheet — covering 80% of the island — connects to the sea. The Sermeq Kujalleq glacier at the head of the fjord moves faster than any glacier outside Antarctica, and some of the ice in it is estimated to be 250,000 years old. When enormous icebergs calve off and float downstream into Disko Bay, the result is one of the most surreal landscapes we’ve ever seen.

Already by this morning, the view from our window had changed — some icebergs had broken apart overnight, others had drifted closer to town, and new shapes had appeared that weren’t there before. We suspect this is going to be a daily ritual: comparing notes over breakfast about what has shifted. We even started naming them so we could track their movements — the “meringue,” the “cathedral,” and one that looked suspiciously like a reclining polar bear. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

Despite the intense cold, we were eager to bundle up and hike along the shore for a closer look. It still isn’t easy to be outside for hours at -20°C (-4°F), but we’re getting better at it. The trick, we’ve learned, is to keep moving and to accept that the area around the eyes (the only part that’s exposed) is going to hurt a bit. That’s just part of the deal.

Day 3: Breaking the ice

Ilulissat is the third largest town in Greenland, which sounds impressive until you learn that means about 4,600 people. In winter, life here gets isolated. The sea freezes over, making it difficult for boats to navigate, and a cargo ship that normally delivers food and supplies every three weeks hasn’t been able to break through the ice for many weeks now. The supermarkets are out of eggs and running low on fresh vegetables. The only vegetable still widely available? Iceberg lettuce. We couldn’t make that up if we tried.

Greenlanders don’t seem too bothered, though — they have their own local sources of food: ice-fishing for halibut, hunting musk ox, and catching seals. And honestly, it’s hard for us to imagine that anything on that supply ship would taste as good as the musk ox burgers we ate here. Those were outstanding.

Thankfully, the ice shifted enough today that boats could finally force their way out of the harbor, so the food situation may improve soon. We took advantage of the opening and went on a boat excursion into the icefjord, where we were surrounded by gigantic icebergs that had recently calved off the glacier. Seeing them from water level — towering above the boat, glowing blue from within — was a completely different experience from the hiking views. Greenland is exceeding every expectation we had.

• Boat excursion: World of Greenland

Day 4: Epic dogsledding

We spent the whole day exploring snow-covered terrain on sleds pulled by teams of Greenlandic huskies, and it was everything we’d hoped for and more.

It didn’t take long after arriving in Ilulissat to notice that this town is full of dogs — and not just any dogs. Greenlandic dogs are bred for cold tolerance and sled-pulling, and they’re an essential part of the local fishing industry. The best halibut, fishermen told us, comes from the fjord near the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, but since the glacier is a UNESCO protected site, snowmobiles are prohibited. So fishermen rely on dogsleds to reach it and haul the catch back. Fishing is the main industry in Ilulissat, and every fisherman has ten or more dogs, which means the dog population of Ilulissat is… significant. We were reminded of just how significant whenever the church bells rang: every dog in town started howling in unison, drowning out the bells entirely. It sounded like the town was being invaded by wolves.

We fell in love with these dogs immediately. They’re incredibly beautiful — thick-furred, powerful, and built for this environment. But locals kept warning us not to get too close. These are working dogs, not pets, and they aren’t friendly to strangers. Most live in dedicated areas on the outskirts of town, chained once they’re older than four months to limit aggressive behavior.

Our B&B hosts Jannik and Paa used to have 15 dogs and a sled, but switched to a snowmobile when they became more commonplace — “I don’t have to feed the snowmobile every day,” Jannik explained. When they sold the team, one dog had recently had puppies, so they kept three as pets: Champagne, Vodka, and Busy. Those three let us get all the cuddling, petting, and playing out of our system before we went out on a dogsled with the working dogs, who had very different ideas about personal boundaries.

The dogsledding itself was extraordinary. Our mushers took us deep into the mountainous interior, far from town, across a vast white landscape with nothing but snow, ice, and sky in every direction. The dogs were incredible to watch — pure focus and joy, pulling with an energy that made it clear they were born to do this. The only sounds were the runners gliding over the snow, the panting of the dogs, and the occasional shout from the musher. We climbed ridges with panoramic views of the ice sheet stretching to the horizon, then raced downhill at speeds that made us grip the sled and laugh at the same time. At one point, we stopped in the middle of absolute nowhere, surrounded by silence so complete it felt like the world had been put on mute. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best days of our lives.

• Dog sledding: World of Greenland

Day 5: Snowmobiles can go anywhere

After yesterday’s dogsledding, today we explored the Greenlandic interior by snowmobile — and it was an entirely different kind of thrill. Where the dogsled experience was mostly serene and meditative, snowmobiling was 100% pure adrenaline. These machines are astonishingly capable: we traversed ice fields, carved through deep snow, and climbed ridiculously steep slopes that we wouldn’t have attempted on foot, let alone on wheels. It reminded us of our motorcycle back home — that same feeling of freedom and exposure to the environment — except the environment here is a vast, frozen wilderness that stretches to the horizon in every direction.

We rode from the coast deep into the interior, where there is genuinely nothing — no buildings, no trails, no signs of human existence. Just ice, snow, and sky. We don’t have a single photo from the day because we were too focused on the experience to stop. Sometimes the best moments are the ones you just live through rather than document.

• Snowmobiling guide: Anders Lykke Laursen, operator of Nuuk Water Taxi

Day 6: A perfect farewell

Our last day in Greenland, and we saved something special for the finale: a scenic flight over Ilulissat and the icefjord. We’d spent the week hiking among the icebergs and boating alongside them, but seeing them from the air was a completely different revelation. From above, the scale of the ice becomes apparent in a way that’s impossible to see from the ground — enormous bergs that towered over our boat turned out to be just fragments of a vast frozen river of ice pouring out of the glacier and into the sea. The patterns and colors were mesmerizing: deep blues, whites, and turquoises set against the dark Arctic water.

It was the perfect way to end this trip. Greenland surprised us in every way — the raw beauty, the resilience of the people, the dogs, the cold that somehow became our friend. We arrived curious and left completely smitten. This strange, frozen, misleadingly named island has a hold on us now.

• Scenic flight: Air Zafari